Portland author Patrick deWitt got his break through free drinks.

Before he made it to Portland, novelist Patrick deWitt
tried to leave Los Angeles six times. Six times he swore he was bailing
for good. Six times he was sucked back into the city’s black hole.

The author, who broke through with 2011’s The Sisters Brothers
and is preparing a new novel, spent the nights of this interminable
tenure working as a bar-back, writing in his spare time. Laboring in
obscurity and inundated with scenes of loneliness and depravity, deWitt
spun the bleakness of bar life into his first novel, Ablutions, a work he describes as semiautobiographical. He thought it was good, but had no idea how to pursue publication.

Then one night a
friend cruised into the bar with another guy in tow. Sitting in the
living room of deWitt’s North Portland apartment, surrounded by his
vinyl collection and the flotsam of his son’s toys, I listen to the tale
of the night he got his break.

“I knew this guy
could help me,” deWitt says, running a slender hand through his sandy
blond hair. “So, I gave him a bunch of free drinks and got him very
drunk. At the end of the night, I asked him if he would read my novel.”
He paused, his face a mask. “He was unhappy about this.”

Turns out the guy in the bar was D.V. DeVincentis, the screenwriter behind High Fidelity.

This is how
DeVincentis tells it: “I was sitting at a bar in Hollywood at around
3:30 or 4 am. Bars in L.A. close at 2, so it can be assumed that there
was stupid shit going on and no one was supposed to be there. Some guy
came up to me and asked me if I was me, which I confirmed. He told me he
liked my writing, and that he was also a writer, and would I read
something that he’d written. This guy was on the other side of the bar,
so he held all the power in the setting. I told him, sure, I’d read it.
He gave me a drink, I gave him my address and I forgot about it.”

Some days later, DeVincentis received deWitt’s manuscript in the mail. He was unhappy about this.

“Odds and experience
said that this would be a terrible book,” DeVincentis says. “This is
because almost all books and scripts and audition tapes and demo tapes
are terrible. The unique situation in which I’d received the manuscript
made the prospects of it being any good even more hopeless than usual. I
decided right there that I would take the manuscript directly to the
recycling bin 20 yards away with the rest of the unsolicited contents of
my mailbox and toss it, but that I’d be a real sport and read what I
could of it along the path there.”

By the time he got to
the recycling bin, he was hooked. “I stood there reading for about 40
minutes, the manuscript laid out on top of the stinky recycling bin,
before finally realizing that I should just take it inside and finish
it.”

DeVincentis’ enthusiasm for Ablutions
set in motion a series of events that would lead deWitt to his agent.
In the meantime, deWitt finally broke free of L.A.’s gravity and wound
up living on an island near Seattle, commuting three hours a day by boat
to work a construction job. When he got word his book had finally sold,
he went into shock.

“I got an email with a
number that represented enough [money] for me to quit my day job, and I
remember almost forcing a feeling,” he says. “I remember walking out to
tell my mom in the garden and wondering why I didn’t feel better about
it. It was a moment I’d imagined so many times that when it actually
came to pass… it was anti-climactic.”

Eager to get away from Seattle, deWitt used his advance to move his family to Portland and started work on what became The Sisters Brothers,
a taut Western that would end up being short-listed for the Man Booker
Prize (deWitt is Canadian) and subsequently finding its way onto TheNew York Times bestseller list.

The Sisters Brothers
relays the journey of Eli and Charlie Sisters, assassins in pursuit of
an eccentric miner with a name so absurdly wonderful I snorted milk
through my nose the first time I read it. Narrated by Eli, the novel has
the crackle of omniscience. I offered this to deWitt.

“Eli
is uncannily overinformed,” he agreed. “It was hard to get to the point
of knowing him, but then one day I knew him very well. Once you get to
know these people, you just let them go and see what happens. It’s like
watching rats in a cage. You just comment on what they do rather than
force them to do any one specific thing.”

DeWitt claims he didn’t set out to write a Western.

“I
read a Louis L’Amour book once, but I don’t remember what it was about,”
he says. “When you’re ignorant of a subject, you’re relying 95 percent
on imagination and instinct, and that’s where we’re happiest anyways. I
understand the clichés and it was fun to address them, but it was also
fun to make up a world that surely never existed.” He raised his
eyebrows. “I mean, it’s fiction writing. You’re just making shit up.”

In a
testimony to just how much he relied on imagination, deWitt described
the comparative enthusiasm his father brought to researching the history
of the gold rush.

“My
father kept bringing me books about the gold rush and I didn’t even open
them,” he says. “At one point, I was trying to figure out the location
of [book character] Warm’s cabin, and my dad got out all these maps.
He’s like, ‘Well, it could’ve been here. Or maybe over here.’ And I’m
like, ‘Can you please just put your finger on a spot so I can just get
on with my fucking life, man!?’”

Readers are given
virtually no background on the Sisters brothers, save that they are in
the employ of a dark figure known as the Commodore. While traveling from
Oregon City to San Francisco, they encounter characters and situations
loosely modeled on the immediately recognizable templates of the pulp
Western. Eli and Charlie bounce like flaming cannonballs from gunfights
to campfire coffee, interacting with prostitutes, prospectors and
prepubescent wagon train brats. Through their constant patter, deWitt
channels to devastating effect the spirit of Charles Portis, whose True Grit sets the gold standard for the style of exceedingly mannered cowboy dialogue the brothers employ.

It is in the
oscillations of Eli’s disposition, between moments of gentleness and
unbridled fits of pique, that the novel gains its deepest purchase. He
is demure to the point of awkwardness with women, but goaded to anger
can become an instrument of violence so profound that numerous reviewers
have drawn parallels between the brothers’ tale and the scorched work
of Cormac McCarthy.

In the wake of his
success, deWitt has already begun work on a new book, roughly based on
the European fables that he has been reading to his son.

“They’re appealing to
me because a lot of them are really perverse, negative and harsh, but
often have an uplifting message as well,” he says. “They’re very
straightforward, and they contain a lot of elements of the
supernatural.”

After an hour, having
long since drained the complimentary mug of tap water deWitt provided
me with, I began gathering my things. Before leaving, I asked if he was
connected with any Portland writers. He’d apparently gone out with Willy
Vlautin for drinks just a couple nights before.

“I was sitting there
drinking with him and a couple other writers, and I thought, ‘I need to
get out more,’” he says. “The problem is, when I go out I tend to drink,
and then I can’t write the next day.”